Tag / David Foster Wallace

“Men Recommend David Foster Wallace To Me” (its title clearly a nod to Rebecca Solnit’s seminal “Men Explain Things to Me“) speaks what is in all of our hearts. At twenty-three, I thought I was the only woman to have figured out that you NEVER go on an OKcupid date with a guy who mentions David Foster Wallace in his profile. As it turns out, every literarily-inclined woman discovers this sooner or later. Janes and I call it “Bernie syndrome”: the thing itself may be great, but its fans SUUUUCK. (via Electric Literature)

The Atlantic enumerated the failures of the Girls finale, and we agree with 80% of it. (Review to come)

[HOMELAND SPOILERS] Rupert Friend agrees with us that Quinn’s suffering had started to feel sadistic and that this was the right time for The Thing That Happened to happen. He also essentially says the exact same thing I’ve been arguing all along about Quinn: “He takes responsibility and has a moral code. And I’m not sure that Carrie does.” (via EW — and 17 bajillion bonus points to Rupert, by the way, for graciously but firmly correcting EW when they referred to an adult sexually abusing a child as a “sexual relationship.”)

The End of the Tour was never going to escape the David Foster Wallace mystique; the famously expansive author has become paradigmatic of the “tortured artist,” to the point that his literature is now almost inextricable from the tragedy surrounding his life and death. He was (it already seems hard to remember) a flesh-and-blood man, but for better and for worse he embodies an archetype in American culture: the misunderstood genius, the voice of an alienated generation, the lotus flower who was too pure to stay mired in the crudities of this world for very long.